


you in the sea

by Siria



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-18
Updated: 2011-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-19 12:51:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is tired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you in the sea

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to hermette and sheafrotherdon for their careful betaing and their cheerleading.

The piece of rusting rebar jutting out from the wall forced Steve to hold himself at an odd angle, center of gravity thrown off by the obstacle at his back and the crumbling concrete beneath his feet. Not the most comfortable place to spend an hour or two, but Steve had been through worse, and with worse company. Kono certainly smelled nicer than the guys Steve'd been in the SEALs with, could probably strip and reassemble a gun faster than some of them, and thanks to years spent on a surfboard didn't seem to think that standing on a disintegrating five inch wide ledge, buffeted by strong wind, was all that big a deal.

The only complaint she had was that Chin wasn't getting the rescue chopper to them quicker. "You'd think," she said, squinting against the spattering of raindrops, "that Chin would be more considerate about this. If we're late for Ji-Hye's Seokka Tanshin-il party, she'll kill us."

Steve wrinkled his nose. "Isn't killing people on Buddha's birthday kind of... wrong?"

"Little bit," Kono agreed. "Also tacky. But little things like that haven't stopped Ji-Hye before now."

There was silence for a moment. Steve scratched at the smear of blood which itched as it dried on his left forearm. He couldn't remember which of the thugs it had belonged to originally, but he supposed that wasn't so material when all three of them had taken a header from the top of the building when the scaffolding collapsed. "Hey," he said, moved to speech by a moment's curiosity, "is Ji-Hye the cousin on your dad's side, the one who caused that big hoopla a little while ago, dropped out of paramedic training to become a beautician?"

Kono looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "No, Ji-Hye's my cousin on my mom's side, and you're thinking of what happened with Lalama. Ten years ago. You're behind on the scoops, brah."

Steve frowned, certain at first that Kono and he were thinking of two separate incidents—but no, now that he considered it, it would have to be almost ten years ago now. One of the few times he'd been granted leave long enough to make it back to Hawaii; he remembered his dad telling him about it, rolling his eyes over how something so petty could be so thoroughly distracting his partner from the job at hand. Funny, now that Steve thought back on it, that his father had been so down on a young Chin Ho for letting family problems preoccupy him; maybe not funny at all. "So Ji-Hye is the one whose dad owns the book store?"

"Uh," Kono said, "that closed down five years ago. You need a refresher course in the Kalakaua clan, boss," and from then until the black shape of the helicopter appeared in the sky, Steve tried his best to keep his footing while Kono spun the web of her family out around him.

Kono didn't have much practice climbing a ladder up into a hovering helicopter while caught in its downwash, so Steve let her go first, shouting encouragement to her over the noise of the engines. She didn't seem overly fazed by it, though, had already found a seat and a spare pair of aviators by the time Steve made it up the ladder himself.

"That wasn't so bad," she said, grinning at him from behind the dark-tinted glasses, "Looks like I'll make the party after all."

"Guess so," Steve said, leaning back against his seat. For some reason, the rush he usually felt at the successful completion of a mission, the adrenaline that normally sparked beneath his skin and kept him awake half the night, had abandoned him. He felt tired, exhaustion turning his bones lead-heavy, and he lay back against the headrest, let Kono do the talking, while the chopper took them _makai_ to Honolulu.

Chin was waiting for them when they got back to the city. He was leaning against his car door, wearing a shirt so brightly patterned that Steve could have used it to pinpoint a drop zone during a jump. Steve figured that meant this was going to be a pretty big party. Chin nodded at Steve. "HPD are on their way out to the site now. Shouldn't take Forensics long to find a link from that lab back to Ferguson."

"Good," Steve said. "Danny?"

Chin shrugged. "Defense reached a deal with prosecution shortly after you guys took off. Parole after five to seven with good behavior, in return for names. Danny didn't have to take the stand after all."

Kono winced. Steve couldn't blame her. Not only had Danny produced a very nice suit from the depths of _somewhere_ in order to testify at Li's trial, he'd also donned his very favorite tie, the one Grace had given him as a birthday present a couple of years ago. That tie only got brought out when Danny meant serious business; sullying it with a mere wasted trip to the Federal Courthouse was bound to make at least that one little vein in his forehead throb. It never boded well for Steve when that little vein started to throb.

"Where is he?" Steve asked.

"Taking out his frustration on paperwork," Chin said, face a rueful grimace. "I already told him if he breaks another computer, I'm not fixing it for him. You want me to drop you home on our way to Ji-Hye's? It's not out of our way."

Steve considered for a moment. He was pretty sure he was out of beer, and he'd finished spackling the latest round of bullet holes in his drywall last week. The overdue library books sitting on his living room table would only be a reminder to him of the fit of bored desperation that had led him to check out _Eat, Pray, Love_ on a librarian's recommendation, despite the fact that he hadn't had time to make it through a book that wasn't an ops manual in at least ten years. He shrugged. "Drop me off at HQ instead?"

Inside the building, it was dim and quiet—no phones ringing; no suspects banging on the door of the supply closet, saying that they were ready to talk now; lights switched off in most of the rooms. Only from Danny's office came the warm golden glow of a desk lamp; the low, tinny sound of music playing through laptop speakers. Steve didn't think he made any noise as he walked, but before he could possibly be in Danny's line of sight, Danny called, "It has been a very long day, Steven, and the forms explaining why you had to dangle a suspect off a bridge must be completed in triplicate. I hope you brought me beer."

"I have no beer, Danny," Steve said sadly, poking his head around the door of Danny's office.

"Then you're fired," Danny mumbled without looking up from what he was writing. His suit jacket was slung over the back of his chair; the crisp white sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his elbow; the blue silk knot of his tie had been tugged loose so that it hung halfway down his chest. Steve stood and watched him until Danny raised his head. "You're a freak, you know that, right? A creepy, staring freak who... what the hell is that?"

Steve looked down at his pants. He looked back up at Danny. "A stain."

"A stain, he says, a— Yes, it's a _stain_ , a large stain, I'm very much aware that it's a stain, see how I have eyes in my head. What I'm asking is what the stain is made—actually, you know what, no. I don't think I want to know that that is, I had food today. Are you going to sit or what? You standing there staring at me is making me nervous."

It had taken him a while, but somehow Steve had grown used to Danny's staccato way of talking, his habit of jumping from A to B in ways that Steve couldn't follow. A couple of months ago, Steve might have balked, made some excuse, but his office was dark and his house echoed and Danny was looking at him with a kind of patience that was at odds with the brisk tone of his voice. Steve went inside, slumped down on Danny's couch, closed his eyes.

"Wanna tell me about it?" Danny said after a moment or two.

"Nope," Steve said.

"Well, tough," Danny said, "because you'll have to, seeing as you're going to make me do all the paperwork for a case I wasn't even _involved with_."

"You're a pain in my ass," Steve said without opening his eyes.

"Ah," Danny said sharply, "he emotes," but he was quiet when Steve finally told him about Kono chasing Ferguson's guys into the building; had nothing more than a tsk for Steve's explanation for why a firefight really had to break out; never once suggested that maybe Steve might be better off going home, sleeping, coming back to work on this in the morning when he was fresh.

Steve crashed right there on Danny's couch; woke up with a blanket thrown over him, warming him against the morning's chill.

**********

The next few days were quiet. Airport security picked up Ferguson trying to fly to Singapore on a false passport, and that was enough to hold him while Forensics worked on gathering the evidence that would see him put away for good on the trafficking charges. Steve finished the paperwork for the case quicker than expected—thanks in large part to a program Chin had written to automate some of the computerized forms—which was nice. The downside was that, since Friday morning shaded into Friday afternoon with no sign of downtown Honolulu combusting, Steve ended up back at his house by one with nothing to do and all weekend to do it in.

The waves weren't up to much, which ruled out surfing. He put in a mile swimming at the best pace he could before deciding that maybe he should get out of the house for a little bit. There was stuff he needed to finish fixing up the house, and he needed to get some groceries—Chin had threatened to turn him in to the Governor for defrauding the state if he swiped another roll of toilet paper from Five-0 headquarters.

He navigated to the grocery store, stocked his cart with things that looked easy to cook but not so likely to rot in his fridge the next time they had a case that had him living at the office for days. Steve mourned the simplicity of MREs, but Danny had taken one look at the ones that lived in the lockbox in Steve's truck and declared that yes, there was apparently a foodstuff worse than everything-with-pineapple, so Steve didn't think he was allowed to just bulk order them online and have done with it.

Getting to the hardware store proved more difficult, though. Last time he'd patched up the bullet holes in his wall, he'd relied on the wood Kamekona brought him and the supplies his dad had kept in the garage. He'd run through most of them—needed nails, cans of paint; a new spirit level, having used the old one to splint that guy's leg that one time—but when he got on the road he realized that he couldn't remember where exactly to go. Steve headed to where he thought there’d been a Lowe's a couple of years ago, but it had been replaced by some big box clothing retailer. He pulled into the parking lot, sat in his truck for a disoriented moment or two while a steady stream of shoppers ebbed and flowed around him, shopping carts rattling over the asphalt. Eventually, he thought to pull out his phone and call up a map to guide him to the nearest hardware store. He felt oddly ashamed at having to do so, at still feeling a little lost sometimes in the place that was his home.

Steve had just about finished unloading his purchases from the truck and was contemplating sitting out on the lanai with a beer when he got the call. He tensed as soon as he saw Chin's name on the screen, knew there was no good reason why Chin would be calling him when he was supposed to be taking Malia out that evening. "What happened?"

"Double homicide," Chin said, tense. In the background, Steve could hear Danny's voice—raised, sharp, his words made indistinct by distance. "Governor wants us on it."

Steve got the address from Chin, told him he'd be there in twenty. He reversed out of his drive at such speed that the last three cans of white paint in the back of the truck rattled and clattered loudly enough that Steve could hear them over the growl of the engine; by the time he got to Waimānalo, they were all dented beyond use. The place Chin had directed him to was less house and more full on mansion—an estate just outside of the town, a big clapboard, Colonial-style building that looked incongruous amid the lush, broad-leaved greenery. Kono met him at the front door. He didn't recognize the names that she gave him—Tom and Laurie Rouviere—but between the size of the house and the fact that the Governor was directly involved, Steve was willing to bet that they'd had connections.

"Both mid-forties, no kids. This is their vacation home; they've been here three days," Kono said, leading through a series of rooms into a blue-painted living room. "They were supposed to Skype in to their software company back in San Jose about nine this morning, our time. Never made the call, didn't answer their cells or the landline. One of their employees got worried, called their groundskeeping company. He found them here a couple of hours ago, called HPD."

White wood furniture sat on plush, pale carpeting; French doors stood open, looking out over the grounds and the beach and the ocean beyond. The fading afternoon light was more than compensated for by the flash of cameras as forensic techs took pictures of the bodies lying on the floor. Tom and Laurie Rouviere—he was slumped backwards against the arm of an over-stuffed sofa, spilled glass of water on the floor beside him; she was wide-eyed and supine in the middle of the room. Steve grabbed a pair of gloves from a passing tech, tried to take as much of it in as possible, all the details of posture and position, because what he'd seen at first glance was worrying enough. "This wasn't a robbery gone wrong," he said, crouching beside Tom Rouviere's body.

Kono shook her head. "Not with that kind of shot." Steve had no desire to pull Rouviere's body away from the sofa and see the mess that had been made of the back of his skull. It was enough to see the neat, incongruous hole in his forehead, a circle mimicked by the startled round of his mouth. This was a professional's work, an execution, and the position of both bodies made it likely that the shot had come from outside.

He stood, went over to the French doors and was met there by Chin, who was running some kind of calculations on a tablet computer—bullet trajectories, if Steve had to guess. "What've you got?"

"Laurie Rouviere was five nine, her husband was five ten," Chin said. He ran his fingers over the screen, called up a rough schematic outline of house, grounds and shoreline; gestured at a low, rocky headland some distance down the beach. "Factoring in their relative positions, I estimate the shot came from that direction. Four hundred and fifty to five hundred yards."

That removed any doubt. From that distance, with an onshore breeze to factor in and two clean kills regardless, the shooter had to be a professional, likely ex-military. Steve felt a muscle in his jaw clench. The look Chin gave him wasn't sympathy, but it was discerning, which was almost worse—especially when the guy was standing there in a neatly ironed button down and a pair of pressed slacks which said that Malia was feeling a little irritated with all of them right now. "Ibuprofen?" Chin offered, voice sand-dry. "Maybe if you take it _before_ the tension headache hits this time, instead of..."

"I'm fine," Steve said shortly. In his head, he was starting to catalogue all the things that would need doing—calling the Governor, making lists of possible rogue snipers with the ability to carry out a hit like this, running background checks on anyone this couple had ever met. "Where's Danny?"

Chin nodded in the direction of a squat garage off to one side of the house. "Interviewing the groundskeeper. Guy wasn't really able to talk when HPD got here."

"Fainter?" Steve asked. He'd had some experience with fainters since he'd started this job.

"If only it were that easy," said Chin, falling into step beside him.

Bobby Nguyen, it turned out, was a vomiter. When Steve and Chin rounded the corner of the garage, they were confronted with the sight of the guy doubled over one of the flower beds, dry heaving, while Danny stared up at the sky with an expression on his face that was eloquent testimony to a longing for Jersey.

"I'm sorry," Nguyen said when the spasms had finally passed. He was a skinny kid, not quite Steve's height, all arms and legs and wearing a UH t-shirt so crisp that Steve was willing to bet he was still a freshman. "I'm sorry, I, I just—"

"Hey," Danny said, waving aside his frustration and Nguyen's embarrassment in a casual manner that spoke of a parent's hard-won familiarity with unexpected bodily fluids. "Don't worry about it, happens to the best of us. I mean me, personally? Not since 1996. But McGarrett here, least little drop of blood?" Danny's right hand described an arc through the air. "Passes out cold."

Nguyen looked over at Steve for a moment, then squinted up at Danny, hands braced on his knees. "That's a total lie."

"You got me there," Danny said easily. "Smart kid. Which is why I know you'll be able to recall for us if you've seen anything unusual around here the past couple of days. Seen the Rouvieres acting strange, noticed any new people around the house?"

Nguyen shook his head. "They tend—tended—to keep to themselves. Worked even when they were here. Mrs Rouviere did yoga out on the beach a lot, though. Mr Rouviere took naps out in that hammock over there, read some trashy novels. Went out a little in the evenings, but not as much as you'd expect for people like them."

Steve frowned. "People like them?"

"The Rouvieres' software company is a pretty significant one," Chin said. He tapped something into his tablet, held the screen up so that Steve could see the search results. "Rogue Software Ltd is currently valued at two and a half billion dollars. Or will be, until news of their death gets out."

"Two and a half billion dollars?" Danny said, eyebrows rising. He looked up towards the house, rocked back a little on his heels as if considering. "Somehow that makes this place look sort of modest."

**********

"Okay," Danny said in the truck on the way back to the Five-0. His voice had that too-even cadence it sometimes took on when he was working his way up to a truly epic rant. Steve kept his eyes fixed on the road. "Let us recap. We have a billionaire couple shot execution-style. We have a Governor who is none too happy about this, because lots of billionaires come to Hawaii to drink mai tais and spend some of their oodles of dollars, and none of them want to feel like they're endangering their lives doing so. We have no witnesses, no apparent forensic evidence except for the two bullets Max will soon be digging out of our vics' skulls, and the imminent arrival of world media on the scene. You remember what it was like the last time that happened, Steven?"

Steve sighed. "I'm not allowed to talk to CNN," he recited by rote. "When I talk to CNN, bad things happen. Talking to CNN means that Steve will not be allowed to drive the Camaro for a month. For CNN, see also MSNBC, the BBC, and anything owned by Rupert Murdoch."

"Ah," Danny said. "At last, he learned something."

"This is not particularly helpful right now, Danny." Steve risked a glance over at him. Danny looked tired—dark circles under his eyes, stubble shading his cheeks.

"You shut your mouth," Danny said, "I am always insightful and informative. Hence why right now, I'm telling you we need to pull over and get some coffee, because I have a feeling this is going to be another all-nighter and there's no way that battery acid purchased on the government dime is going to keep me going."

Steve pulled in to some little late night coffee place when they got back to downtown Honolulu, and let himself get badgered into paying for Danny's coffee, strong and dark and topped with a mound of whipped cream ( _Say not one word, McGarrett_ ), as well as his own. Steve didn't argue, for once. He knew there was a certain kind of distraction to be gained from riling Danny up, from finding the right combination of words that would wind him up and make him go, but most of Steve's mind was preoccupied with compiling lists of possible suspects.

There was always a certain amount of luck associated with any long-distance sniper shot, but to make two such shots in quick succession told him their shooter had a lot of training. He could think of a handful of guys from various branches of the service who could do it. Several Israelis too, some Brits, that smug Russian who'd been his persistent, annoying shadow the one long month he'd spent in Tajikistan. Any one of them might have been able to make both shots, but he couldn't think of a reason why any of them would go after a couple of software billionaires. Not unless one of them had gone rogue.

He drove back to headquarters on autopilot, and only managed to drag himself out of his own head when he registered the fact that Danny was poking him in the arm. "Hello, hi," Danny was saying, "I don't know about you, but I'm not such a fan of the feeling that I'm talking to myself. It's not so good for my self esteem."

"There's nothing wrong with your self esteem, Danny," Steve pointed out as they walked into the building. He took a sip from his coffee—still hot enough that he almost couldn't taste it, but the promise of caffeine made his nerve endings hum. "And you're not talking to yourself, I'm right here."

"Uh huh," Danny said, tone so dry that for some reason, Steve felt his cheeks heat.

Kono and Chin had made it back before them, and every screen in the place was already lit up—maps and plans, photos of the crime scene, lists of possible leads. Chin was standing in the middle of it all, fingertips gliding over the touch screen as he arranged things in a manner that made sense only to him. Kono was on the phone, pacing back and forth as she talked, brow furrowed.

"We got anything yet?" Steve asked Chin.

"If you mean a suspect?" Chin replied, "Then no. If you mean phone calls from the Governor, then she's called your phone three times already. Bad time to leave it in the office, brah."

Steve swore under his breath, hurried to retrieve his cell, closing the office door behind him in order to listen to the Governor favor him with the most forthright language she'd learned by dint of being daughter of one naval officer and wife of another. He'd hoped the closed door would save him from the worst of the mortification, but judging by the smirk on Kono's face, maybe not.

Danny cocked an eyebrow at him when he re-emerged from his office fifteen minutes later, ears ringing, but Steve tried not to dignify that with anything more than a brief narrowing of his eyes. He picked his coffee back up, wrinkled his nose when he realized that it had gone from scalding hot to just the wrong side of lukewarm without making an intermediate stop at drinkable, but knocked it back anyway.

Luckily, Chin's computer skills, coupled with Kono's ability to see patterns in evidence with the same clarity that she could read the swell of the surf, made the drudge work less onerous than it had been on some cases Steve had worked back in Naval Intelligence, but that didn't make it any more palatable. Steve scrolled through lists of phone records, cross-checking names and times, and tried to ignore the syncopated surges of adrenaline that came out of nowhere every now and then—that sneaked up on him, made his left leg jog up and down until Danny lost patience and got into a kick fight with him under the table.

"Seriously?" Chin asked, eyebrows arched, the third time that happened. It was after midnight by then, so Steve decided to give things up for a lost cause, ordered them all to get a few hours’ sleep.

Of the four of them, only Chin was smart enough to have invested in a cot bed for his office ( _My girlfriend's a surgeon_ , he'd said when Kono teased him about buying one, _you think I don't know about the importance of a proper power nap_?), so Kono and Danny curled up under blankets on the sofas in their respective offices, and Steve spent a leaden, drowsy five hours on the one in his, hands resting on his belly and legs hanging over the edge. He was too tired to stay awake, but not exhausted enough for his brain to truly stop thinking.

Just before six, he was slammed back to full wakefulness by what seemed like every phone in the office ringing at once. Steve sat bolt upright, heart racing, but relaxed somewhat when he heard Danny yell from across the office, "It's just the media! Steve, I swear to god, do not answer any one of those calls, do you hear me? Do _not_."

"Danny—" Steve said, just for the sake of form.

"Do not even, Steve McGarrett!" Danny said. Steve looked out into the main office, saw Danny emerge—blinking into the grey dawn light, bleary-eyed like he'd just come off a three-day bender and with some truly epic bedhead. Steve smirked, and Danny rolled his eyes and tried to beat his hair into submission. "Remember what happened last time you spoke to someone with a tape recorder and an eye for scandal! You gave Rachel Maddow fodder for a week."

"I like Rachel Maddow," Steve grumbled, joining Danny outside and helping him try to force the office coffee machine into life.

"Yeah, babe," Danny said, gaze flicking all over Steve's body in a way that made Steve feel hot and cold all at once, in a way that Steve still didn't quite know how to interpret. "All that video footage she ran, I think she likes you too."

One of the calls wasn't from the media, but from the CFO of Rogue Software. Latisha Washington had caught the red eye from San Diego and called them from a cab on her way from the airport, arriving barely ten minutes after Chin finished talking to her. She was a tall woman, smartly dressed; Steve approved of her handshake, which was cool and firm. Her eyes were a little red-rimmed, but Steve couldn't tell straight off if that was from grief or just the product of an anxious overnight flight. Washington accepted the coffee which Chin offered her and sipped at it as she followed Steve and Danny into the interview room.

"I'm not sure what the usual process is in cases like this," she said with an apologetic half smile. "My knowledge of police procedure comes from watching reruns of _CSI_ —I presume you'll need me to formally identify the bodies at some point?"

Danny flicked a quick look at Steve. "Usually that's the responsibility of the next of kin," he explained, "once we get a hold of them."

Washington shook her head, setting her short, fine braids trembling. "Laurie and Tom didn't have any family; at least, not any I've ever heard of. Laurie was an only child, immigrated from Scotland with her parents when she was young. She might have some distant cousins back there, but I don't think she kept in touch. Tom had a brother, but he was killed in a car crash back in '99. It'll have to be me or one of the other people from the company. Saying we're like family to one another is a bit of a cliché, but..." She trailed off and shrugged, spreading her hands a little.

"If you're sure you're okay with that," Danny said, "we can have an officer from HPD bring you down to the medical examiner's facility in a little while."

"I am," she said, nodding, looking down at her hands, which were wrapped around her coffee mug as if it were a talisman of comfort.

"But before we do," Steve said, trying to modulate his voice to patience and guessing, from the way Danny kicked his foot under the table, that hadn't quite managed it, "is there anything you can tell us that might help us find who did this? Any people you can think of who might have wanted to hurt them?"

"I spent the whole plane ride here trying to think of some kind of explanation," Washington said, "but I can't. They were very happy together—they'd been together since Stanford." She paused. Steve noticed her hands tightened around the mug. "Can you... they didn't say, on the phone, but. Are you sure that it wasn't... they didn't hurt one another, right?"

Danny shook his head, the fine lines around his eyes growing deeper and his voice softer. "No, it was a third party. We're positive about that."

Washington took a shaky breath and looked back up at them. "Good," she said. "Good, because I just spent six hours on a plane wondering if one of my best friends might have been capable of killing the other. Here." She opened her slim leather briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of yellow legal pad pages, each one filled with neat, blocky handwriting. "This is how I tried to distract myself—it's an outline of Rogue's recent financial deals. Some of them have been substantial, but they haven't brought us into direct conflict with a competitor. There were a couple of people who had their noses put out of joint at the IPO. Initial public offering," she elaborated, seeing Steve frown. "The company was floated on the stock market two and a half years ago. Those of us who'd been with Rogue from the beginning went from comfortable to well off overnight, but some felt they didn't get as many shares as they deserved. I've given you their names, but I can't think that it's something they'd kill over—not the kind of people they are, and not after all this time."

Steve took the list of names out to Chin to get a start on the investigation, while Danny volunteered to drive Washington over himself in order to identify the bodies. "And hey," he told Steve in what apparently passed for sotto voce in Jersey, "maybe I'll hang around for a bit, act as a buffer between her and Max. You're grieving your friends, you don't need the medical examiner giving you the minute details of the bullet wounds, you get me?"

While Danny was gone, Steve washed up quickly and changed his shirt before rejoining Chin and Kono. Chin was already at work, entering the names Washington had provided into the system, but Kono was watching something whir around in the microwave. Steve sniffed. He hadn't smelled anything that bad since the time he'd had to share close quarters with three other SEALs for a week and the only MREs left were the fake Sloppy Joe filling kind. "Kono," he said, "what the hell?"

"Hey boss," she said, opening the microwave and retrieving a steaming plate of... something. "You want one?"

Steve recoiled. "Is that..."

"Sausage onna stick," Kono said around her first mouthful. "Wrapped in pancakes. There's some cheese sauce for dipping. You want some?"

"Not even a little bit," Steve said, rummaging in the break room for the small electric kettle he used to make tea, while he and Chin traded ideas for possible lines of inquiry. Latisha Washington had said that she couldn't think of anyone in the Rouvieres' lives who'd had real motive to kill them. Steve instinctively felt that she was trustworthy, and was pretty sure that you didn't get to be a CFO at a major company without having a good instinct for reading people. The only other major avenue he could think to pursue was the possibility of overseas financials—perhaps one or both of the Rouvieres had been stashing some money away from home.

Chin shrugged, pursed his mouth, when Steve tossed out the idea. "It's a possibility, but it'll take me a while to rule it in or out. There's Switzerland, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Singapore and that's before considering that they might have used an offshore bank or used a fake name. We can get a copy of their financials, that might help, but if they were determined to hide something..."

"Yeah," Steve said, "I get it. See if you can find out any hints online of financial mismanagement first—rumors, speculation. Deals that industry watchers found weird." He might have felt that Washington was telling him the truth, but Steve couldn't afford to rely on that gut feeling. Even the most perceptive people could be mistaken sometimes. His phone rang, and he dug it out of his pocket to see the screen lit up with a blurry picture of hands waving around. "Danno. What's up?"

"Uh," Danny said, and when Danny began a conversation like that, it didn't bode so good. "So when I got to the coroner's office, Max was just heading out on a call that sounded, uh, potentially relevant to our case and I decided to leave Ms Washington back at her hotel and tag along."

Steve rolled his eyes. "Just spit it out."

Danny heaved out a long-suffering sigh and then rattled off the address of a condo building—a pretty pricey one, if Steve was thinking of the right place. "Penthouse suite. Bring Chin and Kono, they'll probably want to see this. Oh, and babe?"

"Yeah?" Steve said, waving a hand at Chin and Kono to get them to follow him out to their cars.

"Anytime I decide to order a hot dog in the next six months or so, I want you to remind me of this day and stop me."

**********

Felipe Hemmings was an author, a man whose work won awards and honorary doctorates, who wrote sprawling novels about generations of family life in the American South and who was already spoken of in reverent, canonized tones in the pages of the _New Yorker_. He was also, Steve noted as he looked down at him, quite dead—floating bloated on his back in a rooftop jacuzzi, a neat hole punched in his forehead. His voluminous swim trunks billowed around him, vibrant in a bright yellow print.

Danny joined Steve in staring down at the body. "Girlfriend found him. Well, one of the girlfriends, hence the..." He jabbed his thumb in the direction of one of the penthouse's bedrooms. Neither girlfriend, it seemed, had known of the existence of the other, and both were vocal in their displeasure. "No one recalls seeing him after eleven last night. Said he had an article deadline to meet, wanted to get some work done." His tone, as he spoke, was the carefully airy one which Danny adopted when he was hinting at a different topic entirely; he was rubbing at the nape of his neck, a tell if ever Steve saw one.

"What?" Steve asked. He watched as some of the forensic techs, under Max's peevish supervision, took a temperature reading of the jacuzzi's water.

"What _what_? What does that mean?" Danny's arms windmilled. "I'm just passing on key information about this case to you. You know, the kind of stuff which you as leader of this task force might perhaps take an interest in."

Steve shot him a look. "You mean the kind of information the uniform cop told me as soon as I walked in here? The kind of stuff Max has already told me in excruciating detail?"

They both looked over at Max. Danny swallowed. "Jesus," he said thickly. "Is that a meat thermometer?"

"You know," Steve said, pointing at the far corner of the terrace. "Why don't we have this conversation over there?"

"Okay, okay," Danny grumbled, following him, "but before I say anything here, I want you to promise me two things. First, you are not to jump to any conclusions here, okay? Here you are"—Danny gestured at Steve with his left hand—"here the conclusions are"—his right hand stretched out in the opposite direction. "Okay?"

Steve folded his arms, felt a muscle click in his jaw. Danny seemed to take that for agreement.

"Second, just like the conclusions, I don't want you jumping _at_ anyone, you understand me?"

Steve squinted at him. "You know you're not making any sense, right?"

"Sense? I'm totally making sense. I'm making a request of you to restrain your first impulse to _kick someone in the face_ , because I have some context for how you tend to act when your buttons get pushed and this, this is totally going to—"

" _Danny_."

"Fine, fine," Danny said, rolling his eyes. "Max's best guess, the caliber of bullet he's going to dig out of our dead author's forehead is going to match the ones used to kill the Rouvieres. Chances are, it's going to be from the same gun, too. Factor that in to the position of the body, the angle of entry, the fact that our gunman was probably on the roof of one of the next buildings over rather than here... All makes me think we're looking for one kind of person, and since I know how your brain works"—Danny made a circling gesture with his index finger—"like a little hamster on a wheel, I know this is a conclusion you've already arrived at. Which makes me also, by a process of _logic_ , this is a concept I know you're often unfamiliar with, so bear with me here, makes me also conclude that you've already compiled a shortlist of Hawaii's Most Wanted. So I am _asking_ you to please refrain from kicking anyone in the face before we've got some evidence that at least semi-plausibly allows you to do so."

Danny stopped and took a deep breath. Steve stared at him.

"Well? And your response is?"

Steve waited for a long moment, just to mess with him some. "Are you done?"

"Am I... Am I _done_?" Danny made an abortive gesture towards his head, as if to tear out some of the hair which had already been tousled by the rooftop breeze. "I'm your _partner_ , McGarrett, it's my sad duty to inform you that I am _never done_."

"Well," Steve said blandly, in the tone of voice he'd first perfected when he was sixteen and still getting used to the fact that his mom wasn't ever going to come home. "Okay then. I have to go call the Governor."

To say that the Governor was less happy now than she had been the night before was something of an understatement—responsibility and culpability warred in her tone with an almost-hidden tremolo of shock. She'd known Hemmings and liked him, and wanted his murderer found ASAP. "Whatever you need," she said, "you have it."

When Steve ended the call, he looked up to find Chin standing near him—just close enough to make it clear that he wanted to speak to Steve, just far enough away for plausible deniability. Steve arched an eyebrow at him—shorthand for _yeah, what've you got_ —and Chin held up his tablet computer in Steve's direction.

"Taking as granted that Danny's explained his theory to you," Chin said, "I've done as thorough an online search as I can from here. I can't find any relationship between the Rouvieres and Hemmings. No newspaper items, nothing to indicate any financial or investment links—not even a press release from a charity to say that they were both at the same fundraiser."

"So if it was the same shooter," Steve said, "chances are the link is more in his head than between the victims."

"Which means it's going to be that much harder to find out who did this," Chin said, mouth twisting ruefully. He looked back over at the jacuzzi, where a couple of forensics techs were hauling out Hemmings' corpse and putting it into a body bag. "Pity. I liked his books. Good prose. Malia met him once, got him to autograph a couple for me."

Steve assessed the complexion of the meaty arm that was vanishing into the black plastic. It was pretty tan—looked like the guy had been here for a couple of weeks at least. "He been here long?"

Chin arched an eyebrow at him. "Brah, he bought this place at least five years ago. Everyone local knows him—he had breakfast at Eggs ‘n Things most mornings."

"Right," Steve said.

Max estimated that the bullet probably came from the south or southeast (" _Though since I've not yet carried out a thorough forensic analysis of the remains, Detective Kelly, this conclusion has only about an eighty five per cent chance of accuracy_ ") and in those directions, there was only one building close enough and tall enough to have provided a platform for a sniper. Steve and Kono went up onto its roof to check it out and verify line of sight while Chin and Danny took care of the diplomatic side of things, requesting the security footage from the building's management. This roof was a lot less manicured than Hemmings' penthouse—bare, rough concrete designed for maintenance access or a fire refuge—but it was a pretty ideal place for a sniper's lookout. Quiet, not overlooked by another building; surrounded by a low parapet on which a rifle could be propped.

Kono whistled as she took it in. From this distance, they could just make out the last of Max's forensics team packing up—indistinguishable blobs in dark uniforms. "Whoever made this shot was good, boss. The wind, the humidity, the drop... even if we weren't five blocks away, that'd be a tough one to make."

"Yeah," Steve said, "I know." Three kill shots of this quality, over a period of two days, narrowed down the pool of possible people even further, from two or three dozen to a mere handful. Yet while he knew that that group had the skills, he still couldn't think of a possible motive—he guessed it was time to start calling in a favor or two, see if some careful questioning would get useful answers from any of his buddies.

They went back to the station—Steve, Kono and Danny divided up the task of interviewing various people who'd known Hemmings, though more for the sake of form than because Steve had any real idea that it would get them a lead. Chin worked on transferring the security footage from both apartment buildings into the Five-0's security system, softly cursing the mindset of people who still thought Windows ME was an acceptable OS to use. By the time Steve had put their last interviewee—Hemming's sobbing agent—into a cab, complete with several awkward pats on the arm, he was starving. He did a run out to the nearest sandwich place, whose staff had long since learned that when one of the Five-0 was spotted pulling into the parking lot they should start working on four extra-large subs, sides, and vats of coffee right away.

Steve juggled the two brown paper bags full of food and cup carrier laden down with coffee into his truck, out of his truck, and through the doors just in time to hear Chin call, "Cuz, Danny, you guys should come look at this."

Steve abandoned the food on one of the side tables, hurried over to see what Chin had unearthed. "What?"

Chin selected a video file on the screen, magnified a single frame of footage from it. "This was taken at 8.21 this morning. Guy walks into the building, takes the service elevator instead of the one for residents. Look what he's carrying." The picture was black and white, and the resolution didn't allow for much by way of detail, but there was no mistaking the unusual shape of the bag slung over the guy’s shoulder.

"Perfect size for a sharpshooter's rifle," Kono said.

"Much," Danny said, "as it's nice to have confirmation of our theory, I would like to register my discomfort with having some nut with a high-powered rifle recreating the Texas Book Depository with the great and good of Hawaii. Just so we're clear."

Steve braced his hands on the computer table, peered a little closer at the image on the screen. The figure walking towards the camera was wearing a baseball cap and a pair of aviator glasses so large they looked like a prop from a _Top Gun_ parody, but something about the posture and the stride was familiar. Steve frowned, racking his memory, but it was only when Kono played the clip through again that he had a startled flash of a name: "Michael Herrick." Steve was never more than passing acquaintances with the guy—different missions, different branches of the service, only a couple of friends in common—but his swagger had always stood out even among guys trained for special ops. Some of it, Steve had heard, had come from how much of a crack shot he was. "Served with the 75th. Finished up his twenty in Afghanistan."

"That's our guy?" Danny said, and Steve knew he was asking for Steve to confirm it to himself as much as to everyone else in the room. "Babe, you sure?"

Steve nodded. "I'm sure. Chin, see if you can call up his service record, get a better picture of him. Kono, start pulling passenger manifestos from the airport—anyone coming in over the last six days. Try to prioritize non-direct flights, anything that stopped off at least twice on the way here. He's going to be trying to disguise his route here. Danny—"

"Hey!" Danny said, holding up a hand. "Stop! You're going to stop right there. No, do not speak," he said, when Steve opened his mouth, "for once in your life, you're going to pause and listen to me. Okay? Good. So. Chin and Kono here are going to take your fine suggestions and run with them. You, my friend, are going to go and retrieve those sandwiches, distribute them to their respective owners, and then I'm going to sit and watch you eat one, okay? Because I appreciate the high strung SEAL princess act as much as the next guy, but if you're going to get all..." Danny waggled his hand in an indeterminate gesture.

Steve squinted at him. "If I'm going to get all _what_? What the hell does that mean?"

"Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about! Your face, Steve. I can see your _face_. That is a face that promises an embolism, stroke, something, from a fatal combination of stick-up-your-ass and low blood sugar. Get the sandwich!"

Steve made a face at him, but dutifully fetched and handed out the sandwiches and the rapidly cooling coffee. He restrained himself as much as possible when Danny sat on the end of the couch and watched him eat, but he was only human. When Danny asked him, despite all the obvious evidence, "You eating that?", Steve felt justified in opening his mouth to let Danny see the half-chewed contents inside.

"Your professionalism never fails to astound me," Danny mumbled around his own mouthful of ahi melt and Steve surprised himself by smiling a little at that. Maybe his blood sugar had been a bit low, after all.

Getting even a censored copy of Herrick's personnel file took several hours—it was hidden behind numerous layers of bureaucratic red tape and complex firewalls, just as Steve was sure his own was—and running facial recognition on so many days worth of footage from the airport took longer still. Steve steeled himself, started making calls to old mutual acquaintances to see if they knew where Herrick was right now—the only forwarding address on his personnel file was a PO box. While he was on the phone, Danny took a copy of Herrick's file photo and went to interview some of the staff at the Rouviere house to see if they recognized him.

When Steve had chased down every last person he could remember who'd hung out with Herrick, he switched some of the monitors to run the local news, a couple of the national networks. The local guys were running with the concerned but cautious angle. The national networks, however, had already decided that this was another sign of the end times and were looping luridly over-saturated publicity photos of the three known victims. A muscle in Steve's jaw tightened when he saw the banner on one of the channels proclaiming LURED TO A TROPICAL DEATH? HAWAII ON HIGH ALERT. When Kono noticed it, she mimed gagging elaborately, and turned all of them off.

"Zilch, zip, nada," Danny said when he walked back into the Five-0 about two hours later. "None of them can recall a _haole_ looking remotely like Herrick hanging around the estate anytime recently. Please tell me you got something."

Steve shook his head. "The PO box listed on the file expired a few years ago; it was in New York. Dave hasn't seen him since they both got out; thinks he might be living in Rhode Island somewhere. Greg saw him three years ago, says he thought he was working security down in the DC area. No one has any idea of his current location."

"Okay," Danny said, pointing at him, "Do not hulk out over this! I can see you practically turning green, rending your clothes, but do not—we're going to solve this, you big—"

"I am _perfectly calm_ —" Steve said, and it was only the fact that Kono had to shout over him to be heard that made him realize he'd raised his voice. Abruptly ashamed, discomfited, stomach twisting with something he didn't want to think about, Steve switched his attention to her. "You got something?"

"I think so, boss," Kono said calmly, because for all she was a rookie still, she had more professionalism in her pinkies than most cops did in their entire bodies, and Steve was going to include himself in that count. "Facial recognition software found him—five days ago, coming in on a flight from the Twin Cities that originated in New York." She gestured at the screen, and Chin called up a video file showing a stream of passengers coming through a jetway—most of them looked like Danny on a particularly cranky day, defiantly mainlander, though they were better than the ones that tried to look _kama'aina_ and failed, aloha shirts semi-buttoned over too-pale chests. But one person stood out—Herrick—looking far more alert than the others did after such a long flight, jaw square and shoulders back. No carry on luggage in his hand, just what looked like a light jacket and a paperback.

"Good work," Steve said, keeping his eyes focused on Herrick's image as the video file looped over and over. "You guys get a lead yet on where he headed from the airport?"

There was a hesitation, and that was enough to make Steve look up. Kono was chewing on her lower lip, a nervous tell she hadn't quite managed to rid herself of; Chin looked vaguely concerned, the way he always did when there was a chance that something might explode. "What?"

"He didn't fly in under his own name," Chin said gently. "I triple-checked the passenger manifesto for that flight, and there's no Michael Herrick, Michael P. Herrick or M.P. Herrick listed. No Herricks at all—but there's this one name, purchased an open-ended return ticket only three days before the flight." He called the manifesto up on the screen, one line already highlighted.

Steve swallowed when he saw the name. The sandwich he'd had all those hours ago threatened to come back up in a flood of hot acid. "John L. McGarrett?"

Chin folded his arms, shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. "It could just be a huge coincidence, but—"

"Please," Danny said, shaking his head, "do not even begin to calculate the statistics on how much coincidence does not factor into our lives, because it would just depress me and I have _years_ to go before I can retire, here."

"That son of a bitch," Steve bit out, ignoring all of them, because now he knew who was behind this. Herrick had no motive to kill these people, no quirk of brain chemistry that Steve could think of that would make him want to take up shooting the rich and legally innocent as a hobby. But there was one person who had the desire to want to mess up Steve's island as much as possible, to want to fuck with _Steve_ , and who had the resources and the contacts to hire a former army sharpshooter to do it. The name hadn't occurred to him before, but now it was the only one that made sense.

"Okay," Danny said, holding up a hand. "You're going to have to actually say the name for those of us who're not gifted with telepathy. Who've you got in mind for this?"

"Hesse."

Danny stared at him for a long moment, blinked, then said, "Okay, I buy it. But two things. One, I'm going with you, and two, I'm driving. No arguments, am I clear?"

"Danny—"

"You don't agree to this, I will personally have Kono cut you off at the kneecaps, you understand."

"Sorry, boss," Kono said with an apologetic shrug, though the look in her eyes was anything but, "I'd side with Danny on this one."

**********

Danny stayed silent only for as long as it took him to pull out of the parking lot and point the car in the direction of Halawa Correctional. "So," he said, glancing over at Steve and keeping his tone so light and conversational that it was obviously a ploy, "I'd just like to point out that I'm not too enamored of the idea of having to explain to my daughter why her Uncle Steve is now wearing a none-too-fashionable orange jumpsuit and living in a less desirable part of town. So if you could maybe refrain, when we get there, from beating the shit out of a federal prisoner, that would be fantastic. Gracie's got enough family members in correctional facilities already to last her a lifetime. I'll be right there with you, but you're gonna have to go about this the right way. You got me?"

Steve didn't answer him, kept his eyes on the road and concentrated on keeping his breathing even. He was so angry that it felt like a physical thing, burning hot and heavy behind his breastbone, and words felt like an impossibility. His hands clenched and unclenched in his lap, feeling empty without the weight of a gun, ordnance, _something_.

"Well," Danny said, eyes cutting over to Steve and then back to the road, "glad we're on the same page here, babe," but his words carried less an undercurrent of sarcasm than they did sympathy, and Steve didn't want to think about why that only seemed to make the ache in his chest worse.

The prison staff were pretty used to members of Five-0 showing up unannounced and demanding to speak with prisoners by now, so it didn't take as long as it should have to bring Hesse up to an interview room. One of the guards even offered to fetch them coffee, her dark eyes bright as she flirted in an affable sort of way with Danny, but Steve couldn't make himself stand still—paced back and forth while Danny chatted with Ku'uipo and kept his eyes fixed on Steve.

Hesse's cheekbones were a little more prominent, his hair a little longer, but otherwise it didn't look as if prison had changed him that much. He sat down at the table provided with an air of supreme unconcern, as if he weren't wearing prison clothes and his hands and feet weren't shackled. His mouth quirked upwards at the corners, aggression poorly hidden behind vague arrogance. Steve was dimly aware that his hands were clenched into such tight fists that they ached.

"Commander McGarrett, Detective Williams," Hesse drawled. "Lovely to see you both, but I think I should remind you that since my prosecution is pending, I don't think I should be talking to you lads without my lawyer present."

"Michael Herrick," Steve snapped. "Why did you hire him?" Patience was rarely his strong suit, and right now he was battling just to stay on this side of the interview room. He was conscious that Danny had positioned himself so he was in Steve's line of sight, between Steve and Hesse—not close enough to be overtly noticeable to Hesse, not enough to stop Steve if he did lose it, but enough to be a reminder. Steve exhaled. He was grateful.

"I can't say I'm familiar with the name," Hesse said, face wrinkling into a parody of contemplation. "I'm very sorry, gentlemen."

"You hired Michael Herrick to murder three people," Steve said. "And you're going to tell me why."

Hesse spread his hands as much as he could, given the shackles. "Now how could I do something like that, when I'm locked up in here? No way at all I could be getting up to mischief—and besides, how could any harm possibly come to the great and good of Honolulu when the Five-0 task force is on the job?"

Steve folded his arms and looked at him for a long moment—this man who had murdered Steve's father; this man whose brother had died on Steve's watch. "Why did you do it?"

"Me? I didn't do anything." Hesse leaned back in his chair; his smile stretched wider. "But I'm sure this is very distressing for you. Some nut out there, taking down people at random, disrupting the tourist industry, terrifying the good people of Hawaii, and you guys with your huge budget not able to stop him. Commander Steve McGarrett, useless and impotent—not words I'd use, now, but I bet some journalists are already asking very personal questions."

Steve didn't remember moving, but the next thing he knew he was leaning right in over the table, hands planted on the scratched-up metal, right up in Hesse's face, so close he could smell Hesse's sweat and the faint mint of his breath. "You got him to use my father's name, you son of a bitch. I almost hope you got your rocks off from that, because I will trace Herrick back to you, and by the time I'm through, you're going to—"

"Hey," Danny was saying. He had one hand resting lightly on Steve's upper arm. "Hey."

Steve didn't turn around. He stayed looking at Hesse, staring unblinking right into Hesse's eyes; there was no hint of fear there, just a flat coldness that made the bones in Steve's face ache. There really was nothing in this for Hesse but pleasure, and Steve didn't think he had any way of combating that.

"Hey," Danny said again, tugging gently on Steve's arm. "Come on, we're done here."

Steve made himself leave the room, nodded at Officer Akana that she could escort the prisoner back to his cell, and strode off down the hallway without checking to see if Danny was behind him. He was, of course, and there was a huff to his breathing which said that he was unhappy, verging on pissed. Steve waited until they were through the security checks before speaking. "Whatever it is you want to say, just say it," he said as they headed back across the staff parking lot to where they'd left the Camaro. The sun was starting to sink below the horizon, but the wind that was pushing stray pieces of litter around the lot was still hot and humid. Steve looked over at Danny just in time to see him rolling his eyes.

"Okay," Danny said, "fine, but I'm going to say this once and once only, because I don't find it such a great hobby to beat my head off the brick wall that is your head all the time, okay? Good," he said, without waiting for Steve to so much as nod his head. "So don't pretend to me, don't pretend to _yourself_ like you came up here expecting Hesse to just roll over and give it up to you. The guy's a goddamn sociopath, he gets off on watching you be miserable and frustrated. He's probably back there jacking off right now to the thoughts of how he's got some asshole shooting up downtown Honolulu for him. I came up here with you because I knew there was no way in hell I'd be able to _stop_ you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to just stand around here and"—Danny's head bobbed from side to side—" _observe_ you losing your shit over something that's not worth it. He's not worth it, Steven."

Steve stared at him. "You done?"

"No," Danny said, wrenching open the door to the car hard enough that Steve was almost surprised that it stayed on its hinges, "No, I'm not done, but there are only so many hours in the day and I'd end up hoarse before you started to listen to me. Get in the goddamn car."

Steve, despite Danny's (and Kono's, and Chin's, and his sister's) frequent assertions to the contrary, did sometimes know when to throw in the towel. He got in the car—mostly, he told himself, because his head was starting to ache from anger and lack of sleep and he wanted Danny to stop yelling at him, and not at all because he wanted that pinched look to fade from Danny's face, the look that said that he was upset on Steve's behalf. Steve had had enough of causing that look on other people's faces to last him for a lifetime.

Danny was quiet until he got them back onto the freeway, then said softly, "You know you're worth more than him, right?" and Steve found he didn't know how to answer that.

He settled for digging his phone out of his shirt pocket and putting a call through to Chin—telling him that they'd gotten no concrete evidence out of Hesse, but that Chin needed to start pulling Halawa's visitor logs and call records since Hesse was admitted. By the time Steve and Danny walked back into headquarters, Chin already had search algorithms running on the records, cross-referencing them with names and numbers that HPD, the FBI and Interpol had on file. Several of the monitors were filled with lines of flickering code, image files changing too fast for the eye to keep up with.

Danny looked impressed, sticking his hands in his pockets as he rocked back on his heels. "I don't have any idea how it is you do what you do," he told Chin, "but I will own to being very impressed."

"Brah, that's a dangerous line of talk," Kono said as she came out of her office. "You give him an inch to talk about this stuff, he'll take a mile and it'll all be _lalau_."

"I'm feeling the love, cuz," Chin said, poker-faced in a way that still didn't manage to hide his amusement.

"I'm just saying, I've sat through a couple of stakeouts with you, I've seen you in an Apple Store, I know what I'm talking about." She turned to look at Steve. "Just got off the phone with some cops in the Twelfth Precinct, NYC. I got a hit on Herrick for a traffic citation in Manhattan a few weeks ago, got in touch with them. They were able to track down his girlfriend, they're bringing her in for questioning now and will get back to us about it soon."

"Okay," Steve said, scrubbing a hand over his face. "Good work, Kono." He knew there were things he could be, should be doing—updating the governor on what little progress they'd made, canvassing local motels and apartment rental offices with Herrick's picture, trying to work out if they could start to see tentative patterns in the victims Hesse had selected—but between anger and adrenaline, his brain felt like it physically ached. He'd never been so glad to catch the scent of the thick, bitter liquid that Danny brewed and called coffee. Hopefully the caffeine would perk him up and take the edge off the worst of his headache.

Danny emerged from their tiny break room bearing a tray laden not only with his terrible coffee, but with all the food which he'd been able to scrounge up. Well, maybe not all of it—Kono's disgusting sausage-pancake things were noticeably absent—but there were several granola bars, some soggy-looking microwave pizza, half a packet of leftover _kakimochi_ , a questionable orange. "Come on," Danny said, "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we yadda yadda."

Steve arched an eyebrow at him.

"What," Danny said, "you think I can't quote from Shakespeare?"

Steve scratched the tip of his nose. "Danny, that's not from... never mind, pass me the coffee."

Danny's special New Jersey Detective blend was starting to burn its way down Steve's esophagus when Chin said, "Huh."

"You got something, cuz?" Kono said around a mouthful of lukewarm pepperoni pizza.

"Maybe," Chin said. "You remember Johnny Qiao? Lived over that barbershop in Kalihi with his grandma?"

Kono's forehead wrinkled for a moment in recollection. "I think so—always reeked of _pakalolo_? Didn't he die a few years back—went for a joyride, flipped the car, killed himself and an elderly couple?"

"That's the guy I'm thinking of," Chin confirmed. "Which is why I'm wondering what he's doing visiting Hesse on three separate occasions over the past four months." His fingers tapped across the screen, highlighting three entries in the visitor logs—Johnny Qiao, address in Kalihi, purpose of visit: 'counsel.' Kono snorted when she saw that.

"So," Danny said, "either Hesse has got some undead pothead providing him with legal counsel, or..." He spread his arms wide as if he was waiting for someone else to finish his thought.

"Someone's using Qiao's identity to see Hesse," Chin supplied.

"Or we've got a zombie epidemic on our hands," Kono said, mock thoughtful, as she stole the last slice of pizza from the plate.

"Don't say that," Danny said, "do not. Please. You will tempt fate, and here I am without so much as a flame thrower or a rocket launcher to help me through the Hawaiian zombie apocalypse."

Steve had to admit to himself that he was a little punchy from exhaustion when he found himself thinking, with approval and in all earnestness, of the appropriateness of Danny's choice of weaponry. He went and stuck his head under the cold faucet in the restroom for a couple of moments, let the water shock him to greater wakefulness, and then called the governor and outlined the latest developments for her. He left out the detail about Herrick using his dad's name—partly because he didn't want the governor to be even a little tempted to take him off this case; partly because she already sounded about as harried as he felt. It was unusual, coming from her, and he got the impression that she was under greater external pressure than he was. Some tech down at the coroner's office had leaked to the media that HPD and the Five-0 suspected a serial killer was on the loose, someone determined to get all John Wilkes Booth with every high profile visitor to the island, and apparently the theory had made the front page of the _New York Times_ ' Sunday edition.

"Get the son of a bitch, McGarrett," she said before she hung up the phone, "and I promise that the beer'll be on me for the next six months."

When Steve re-emerged from his office, Chin was the only one still stooped over the computer—it looked like Danny was on a call to Gracie; Kono was fielding a call in a snappish mixture of English and Korean that made Steve suspect she was talking to her mother. Both ended their calls quickly, though, when Chin gestured at them. "Found something."

"About Qiao?" Steve asked.

"Close," Chin answered. "Younger brother—Jackie. Likes to indulge even more than his big brother." He called up a mug shot on the screen—a round face scarred by acne and prematurely lined by stress and drugs—together with an undistinguished criminal record—possession, possession with intent, DUI, petty theft, vandalism and assault.

"Wait," Danny said, "hold on, hold up here—brothers called Johnny and Jackie? Two diminutive forms of John, two brothers?"

"Ah," Kono said, "'Diminutive.' You're racking up the triple word scores, brah."

"You're just in awe of the power of my vocabulary," Danny shot back, grinning easily. "Unlike with whoever named these two geniuses, one dead and the other, what, involved with Hesse in some way?"

"I found some notes in his file," Chin said. "There's been chatter that Jackie Qiao and a couple of other minor Honolulu criminals have been working for Hesse's gang for the past couple of months—transporting cash, info, minor stuff. Not enough evidence to pin anything on them, but there was also a suggestion that Qiao got pulled into it because he owed Hesse money. A lot of money."

Steve considered this. "The kind of money that'd make Qiao use his dead brother's identity in order to get in to see Hesse in jail?"

"Sounds like it. Qiao seems like the kind of person who'd do anything to his family in order to save his own skin," Chin said, mouth tightening in disapproval. "There's one more thing that my search turned up, too." He called up another file on the screen.

Kono frowned. "A property deed?"

"For a piece of land _mauka_ of Makakilo," Chin said. "Supposedly undeveloped, pretty remote—and purchased not so long ago by one Johnny Qiao, resident of Kalihi."

"Zombie real estate investment," Danny said, "now that is a sign of the apocalypse." He turned to look at Steve, cocked an eyebrow. "You up for a little trip to Makakilo?"

Steve cocked an eyebrow at him in turn. If Qiao had all of a sudden come up with the cash to buy a piece of isolated property in the name of his dead brother, Steve was willing to bet that Hesse was behind it. "I could be persuaded," he said.

"Good," Danny answered, "and let me point out that I'm still driving, here," but before they could head for the door, their phones started to ring. Steve dug his out of his pocket and looked at the display—HPD. He felt thoroughly justified in swearing softly before he answered it, waving at the others to ignore their calls. Steve didn't miss the quick flash of relief that passed over Chin's face at that—he still wasn't entirely comfortable talking to uniform cops—but it was less about sparing Chin and more about the fact that Steve could guess they were all being called about the same thing.

"Yeah?" he said, feeling strung too taut to even pretend at pleasantries. He listened intently to what the officer on the other end had to say, then ended the call having only just remembered to say, "Thanks." He nodded at the others, jerked his head in the direction of the door. "HPD got a tip, someone suspicious matching Herrick's description hanging around at a luxury hotel in Ko Olina."

The drive should have taken them half an hour, but Steve made it in less than twenty minutes, ignoring the yelps of outrage Danny was making from the passenger seat when Kono decided that she was going to race Steve down the freeway. The resort they were headed for didn't rent out a room for much less than a grand a night, and was bound to be full of potential targets—rich, well-known people who'd come to Hawaii to unwind. Ko Olina was also within spitting distance of Makakilo. This place had to be the third target.

They were met at the front door of the hotel by the duty manager, who reminded Steve a little of Chin, only ten years older and female—an air of outward serenity almost managing to hide her distress, laughter lines at the corners of her eyes, her long dark hair pulled back into an elegant chignon. "One of our staff was delivering a message to a guest who was out on the golf course," she told them as she led them through the lobby, down a maze of service corridors and into her office. "He spotted someone moving through the trees planted around the property's perimeter and thought it was odd. We reported it to the HPD as a matter of course—not that I thought it was serious enough to have your task force sent in, Commander."

"Do you have security cameras trained on that part of the property? Anything that could give us a sense of where this guy is headed?" Steve asked.

The manager shook her head. "Our grounds stretch to over 200 acres, there's no way we could cover everything outside of the main communal areas. The best I can do is give you the plans of the hotel property—that might give you something to work with?"

"That would be great," Chin said, all soft-voiced reassurance. "If you have them to hand, I can scan them into our system from here."

"Yes," the manager said, frowning, looking through a filing cabinet that stood in one corner of the room. "I think I have them h—wait." She stopped and looked over at them. "I don't know how it didn't occur to me before now. The footage from the shoot—they're over at the other end of the resort, but they might have caught something."

"They?" Danny said, tone hinting at deep depths of sarcasm lurking beneath his otherwise restrained exterior. Steve was impressed that Danny had the self-control to keep his hands on his hips like that—if he'd been talking to anyone on the team, his hands would have been flying by now, providing punctuation for his frustration. "Who might 'they' be?"

"Oh!" the manager said. "You didn't know? Athena's filming part of her new music video here, a night-time beach scene—she's got one of the beaches roped off for it."

Steve blinked at her. "The Greek goddess of wisdom?"

"You clearly don't spend enough time around Grace and her little tweenie-bopper friends," Danny said, running a hand over his hair. "Athena's the latest big musical thing, top of the charts."

"Shoes like lobster claws," Kono supplied. "Telephone hair. Says she lives inside an egg."

There were times Steve was glad that most of the pop culture of the last decade or so had passed him by, because Kono talked like what she was saying should make sense, but it clearly didn't. Still, his brain seized on the most important part. "Big enough to be a target for Herrick?"

"Absolutely," Kono said, and they all looked at one another blankly for a moment before turning and bolting out the door, along the corridor and in the direction of the resort's private beaches.

Chin called for backup as they ran—police cordon around the resort, ambulances possibly needed, proceed with caution, suspect known to be armed and dangerous—and Steve scanned the tree line for any sign of Herrick, any hint of movement or the glint of moonlight off a gun sight. There was nothing, and though Steve's heart was hammering in his chest from something more than simple exertion, when they got to the site of the shoot there was nothing visibly amiss. Dancers clustered around a giant clam-shell that had been erected right in the surf; on top of it, a woman that Steve presumed was Athena was miming along to a soundtrack, illuminated by a spotlight, and doing something to a chain-mail-clad male dancer that, Steve was pretty sure, would have Danny making noises about an arrest for public indecency at any other time.

Before they could get very close, security came up to block them—guys tall and stocky enough to give even Steve pause, though he knew he could take them. "I'm sorry, folks, this is a closed shoot. We'll have to ask you to take a step back. Athena will sign autog—"

"Seriously," Danny said, squinting, "we look like autograph hunters to you?"

"Five-0," Steve interrupted him, letting Danny and Chin show their badges while he took his Sig out of his holster. "Governor's task force. We've reason to believe someone's targeting your boss. You need to shut this thing down now."

The security guys might not have been former SEALs, but they were good at their job. The guy in charge nodded at some of the others and they broke off to speak with the director, the camera guys, the singer herself. She didn't seem entirely happy with the fact that she was having to break off in mid-shoot—Steve had seen a lot of things in his life, but a petite, irate woman yelling from the top of a fake plastic clam-shell ranked up there with some of the more surreal—but she got with the program quickly enough when the first bullets kicked salt spray high into the air. "Down," Steve yelled over the startled screams of the dancers and extras, "Get down!", while he scanned the tree line for some indication of where Herrick was. The trajectory of the bullets made him pretty sure the shots had come from the southeast, but that didn't narrow things down very much. "Everyone find cover now!"

Athena and her dancers ran for their trailers, improbably high and expensive heels kicked off in the surf in their haste. More shots, and one of the dancers grunted loudly—blood bloomed bright against the corded muscle of his right thigh and he went down heavily. A second screamed and clutched at her shoulder just as a clearly panicked Athena grabbed at her and pulled her to safety inside her trailer. Two more bullets slammed into the door, but the trailer was built solidly—Steve didn't think the bullets had punched through.

"Boss," Kono said, "Think I got him." She jerked her head in the direction of one of the taller trees that grew right where the undergrowth was thickest. Steve squinted, straining to make out shades of grey on black, before he saw what she saw—a dark shape shimmying down the trunk, gun slung over its back. Herrick.

"That's him," Steve confirmed. He double-checked the ammo in his gun. "Kono, you're with me," he snapped. He didn't trust Danny's knee to sprinting over the uneven terrain here, especially not in near total darkness. "Danny, co-ordinate with HPD when they get here. Chin, I need you to get in touch with the governor. You," he said to the video director, who was talking to someone on his cell with great animation, "tell the emergency services that there're two definite injuries, probably be a third in a little bit—"

The director looked at him with utter bemusement, clapped a hand over his phone. "Wait, what? Dude, no, I'm totally phoning this one in to TMZ. My assistant has this one."

Steve was pretty confident in Danny's independent ability to rip the guy a new one for that, so he settled for taking off in the direction of the trees, Kono keeping time right beside him. He gestured for her to veer left while he went right, one either side of where they'd last seen Herrick. Steve cursed the lack of prep time—he had no night vision equipment, no camo gear, no time even to improvise the latter. He moved as quietly as he could over the ground, which was pitted, rocky and treacherous—it was easy to see why the resort managers had decided to leave this part of the property pristine instead of developing it. Away to his right, Steve could hear a faint rustling noise which told him that Kono was moving through the undergrowth—she was much better than most civilians, but the lack of military experience showed, and in a way she was a decoy for Herrick, something to distract him long enough for Steve to take him out with a neat double tap. He couldn't hear anything other than Kono's cautious movements, however, and he crept forward, every sense stretched to the point of screaming, and then he heard it—the sound of an engine starting. " _Shit_. Kono!"

He ran forward, all caution forgotten, and made it to a maintenance road—little more than a dirt track, its gravel surface almost washed away by the winter rains—at the same time that Kono did, and at the same time that Herrick, in a pick-up truck whose taillights showed it to be fire-engine red, had almost reached and rounded a corner. Steve aimed, fired, took out the back tire on the left side, Kono got a shot off that took out a tail-light, but though the truck swerved, Herrick neither slowed down or stopped.

Steve swore again, dug his phone out of his pocket and put in a call to HPD. "McGarrett, Five-0. I need an APB on a red pick-up, recent model, flat rear tire and missing a taillight. Probably heading either _mauka_ or windward from Ko Olina. Driver is a suspect in a shooting, should be considered armed and dangerous."

The officer barely had time to acknowledge the request before Steve ended the call, turning back through the woods with Kono dogged at his heels. There was no need for stealth this time, and twigs and fern fronds crunched and crumpled beneath his feet as he ran, the long muscles in his thighs and calves aching with tiredness. The emergency services on Honolulu had had to up their response times significantly since the Five-0 was founded, and by the time Steve and Kono broke out into the open, several floodlights had been turned on, showing that the hotel grounds were starting to fill up with ambulances and cop cars and more than a few paparazzi. The wounded dancers were being loaded up onto stretchers; Athena herself was wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the steps of her trailer and smoking a cigarette with furious concentration.

"Lost him," Steve called at Danny and Chin as they approached. "You guys okay?"

Danny squinted at him. "I'm not even going to dignify that one with an answer. You got a lead on where he's headed?"

"Nothing solid," Steve said, "but I've got a hunch."

"The Makakilo property?" Kono said.

Steve nodded.

"Makes sense," Chin said. "He doesn't know we know about it, he's going to want a place to lie low until either Hesse gives him a new target or he can get him off the island."

Steve handed over command of the crime scene to the HPD officers, led the way back to their cars. Steve had long since made sure that the trunk of Danny's car was appropriately stocked, and Kono was a natural when it came to this sort of thing. They all pulled out and put on bullet-proof vests—Herrick mightn't know for certain that Five-0 was on the way, but there was no way of knowing he wasn't going to ambush them, either. Steve checked and re-checked his sidearms and his spare ammo, dug a couple of grenades out of the false bottom he'd installed in the trunk.

Danny groaned when he saw that. "What the hell, McGarrett? I thought we made a rule about no more explosive devices in my car!"

Steve shrugged at him, kept his face carefully blank as he slipped a second gun into his ankle holster. "You said no more hand grenades in the glove compartment or in the car door or under the seats. Never mentioned the trunk."

"I hate you," Danny said, "truly, this is a pure hate I'm nursing here," but he pissed and moaned at Steve to put on a seatbelt when they got out onto the road and Steve gunned the car above a hundred, so Steve figured he wasn't all that serious.

They drove through Makakilo at full speed, Kono so close behind him Steve could practically see the expression on her face in his rear view mirror. Once they got through the town, Palehua Road bucked and turned, forcing Steve to slow down a little, gaze flickering between the read out on the GPS and the bends in the road, half-hidden by the thick-growing trees. The property Qiao had supposedly bought lay about a quarter of a mile off the main road, down an unpaved road that was barely more than a reddish earthen track through the trees. Steve was painfully aware of the opportunities for ambush that the driveway provided, especially in the dark, but when they got to the end of the track—a squat cabin sitting at the end of it, a red pickup truck parked next to the front door—Steve saw a familiar figure bolt out the side door and head into the trees.

"I got him," Steve barked, slamming on the brakes and running from the truck. He was dimly aware of the others following him, but this was his—this was on him—and his sidearm was out and at the ready. Herrick was probably armed, though he clearly hadn't taken his sniper rifle with him. The terrain out here was hilly, uneven; Steve didn't know it as well as he knew other parts of the island, but he was pretty sure he knew it better than Herrick, and he hoped for some split-second mistake on Herrick's part, something he could capitalize on. He kept a wary eye out as he moved into the woods—the undergrowth was thick here, and while Herrick didn't have the time to get some elevation on him, there was plenty of cover he could shoot from.

Steve licked his lips, which were painfully dry despite the humidity, decided to go for the Danny Williams' approach—talk the guy out. "Give it up, Herrick. We know who hired you, we know why, we've got an APB out for you at every port and airport on the islands. You've got no way out. We take you in, you give evidence against Hesse, I can put in a word for you with the prosecution." Something moved in the corner of his eye; Steve turned his head a little, saw a glimpse of an elbow poking out from behind a thick, gnarled tree trunk. Careless.

"McGarrett, right?" Herrick said. "Hesse told me all about you."

"Really?" Steve said flatly, circling carefully, slowly, to the right. He kept an eye trained on that faint flicker of movement. Herrick was no doubt weighing up his chances at getting off a shot, at making a break for further cover.

"Yeah," Herrick said, "Like how much you like to test the absolute part of absolute immunity, so you'll forgive me if I don't buy that offer."

"Uh huh," Steve said. He tried for a new tack, something to buy him some more time. "So you know I'm a SEAL, right? Heard about you, back in the day. That stunt you pulled in Somalia. Got you a lot of respect. How'd you end up here?" He saw Herrick shift at that, saw the dull gleam of his gun in the moonlight filtering down through the canopy coverage. Close to taking his shot, Steve guessed, and Steve carefully eased off the safety on his own gun.

"A million dollars per confirmed hit for as long as I could keep bagging them," Herrick said. "Two million for you. You think I'm stupid?"

Steve exhaled, just a little. "Yeah, I do. You know why?"

"Why?" Herrick said, and at this close range, neither of them could miss.

"Because you took your eye off the rookie," Steve said.

Kono's shot most likely took out Herrick's left kneecap; he sagged, cursing, and Steve sunk another shot into the shoulder of Herrick's dominant arm. Herrick tried to fire, but fumbled the gun when Chin tackled him into the soft dirt of the forest floor. He disarmed Herrick while Kono and Steve trained their guns on him.

"You, sir," Danny said, and Steve had no idea how Danny could manage to saunter across the forest floor like it was a regular sidewalk in Jersey, "you are so very much under arrest. And unlikely ever to be able to use that knee again. Good job on that, Kono, really an excellent job. You know, if I was ten years younger and you were just a tad less frightening..."

"Eh," Kono said, beaming, "Nothing to it, boss." She and Chin hauled Herrick upright and cheerfully ignored him when he hissed at the pain. Chin supported his weight with one hand, while he pulled his satellite phone out of his pants pocket with the other and told one of the ambulances to make a detour up here before heading back to the hospital. "You want to book him?"

Danny looked over at Steve, one eyebrow cocked, and it was only then that Steve registered he'd been standing stock still like an idiot for the last few moments, gun still half-raised as if he hadn't realized it was over. He holstered his gun, cleared his throat, tried not to squirm at the way Danny's mouth quirked, ever so slightly, in what looked a lot like sympathy. "Why don't you book him, Danno?"

"Yeah," Danny said, "sure, I can do that," drifting close enough to Steve that his fingertips brushed against the inside of Steve's wrist, before his attention snapped back to the others. "Michael Herrick! Your Miranda rights, let me explain them to you, you're going to love them."

Steve let out a trembling breath he hadn't known he was holding, watched as Chin and Danny tugged a hissing, struggling Herrick up the gentle slope back towards the house. Herrick had been well trained, so he was still trying to get away, but even if he'd managed to get free from either Chin or Danny, he wouldn't have been able to get far on that knee, especially not when he was still bleeding sluggishly from his shoulder. Steve walked behind them up the slope, Kono at his side, hearing trained for the first hint of an approaching ambulance siren—he tried to focus on that, instead of on thoughts of Hesse sitting back in his cell, master-minding this. Hesse, on whom no worse sentence could be inflicted than the life sentence he'd already have to serve.

"You okay, boss?" Kono said softly.

Steve forced a smile at her. "I'm good," he said as they made it to the tree line. Somewhere back along the main road, the ambulances were coming—Steve could hear the wail of their sirens now. "I owe you a beer."

"I'm counting on that," Kono said, punching him lightly in the arm, just as Danny yelled back over his shoulder, "Oh, I see, _Kono_ gets a beer, for _Kono_ you don't forget your wallet. That's just charming, that's what that is."

"Stop eavesdropping," Steve called back to him.

"It's not eavesdropping," Danny said, "my ears are burning, here."

Three ambulances pulled up—the emergency services having realized that they'd do well not to underestimate anything tonight—along with a couple of HPD cars, officers and forensic techs piling out to start processing the cabin. Steve told them to be on particular look out for anything that could directly link Herrick to Hesse or Wo Fat, then pulled out his phone in order to call the governor, let her know that Herrick had been caught. Reception on this particular part of the island wasn't great, and between that and a desire for a quieter place where he could talk—or at least, listen with as much attention as possible while the governor enumerated all the ways in which the past few days had been FUBAR. Steve drifted out behind the cabin, debriefed the governor and agreed with her that yes, yes ma'am, that twenty-year-old bottle of scotch sounded like an excellent idea right now.

When he ended the call, he took a moment to breathe before he headed back—Herrick would have to be questioned, the media would have to be fended off, Hesse would have to be interrogated, Danny's knowing looks would have to be ignored—and Steve just needed a moment. He closed his eyes and in the quiet, he heard it—a faint whimpering sound. He unholstered his sidearm once more and pulled out a flashlight from the pocket of his cargo pants, moved cautiously to peer around the corner of the cabin, but didn't expect what he saw—a dog, skinny and tied up on the end of a long piece of twine, eyes glowing in the flashlight's beam. It lay on the ground, head resting on its paws, and though its ears pricked up when it saw him, it whined.

Steve holstered his gun and the flashlight once more, crouched down and moved forward slowly, kept his hands carefully out where the dog could see him. "Hey, buddy," Steve said, gently, "hey. What are you doing out here?" There was a water bowl, but it was empty, and there was no way the dog's lead would let it make it into the shade of the tree line. Steve very deliberately stopped his hands from forming fists. "Hey, fella, you going to let me take this off?" He held his hands out near the dog, let it sniff and lick at his hands before he carefully loosened the lead. The dog shivered when Steve rubbed behind his ears, and didn't resist at all when Steve scooped him up.

He burrowed into Steve's arms, and Steve rubbed his back gently as he carried him back over to the others.

Danny turned from berating a HPD officer about something when he heard Steve's footsteps on the gravel path. "Hey, hey, where'd you go to... where did that dog come from? Steven, why do you have a _dog_?"

"Found him," Steve said, "Tied up out back. Must have been a guard dog, but they didn't even give him water."

"Hey, little guy!" Chin said, lighting up like he always did around pets. He scratched behind the dog's ear, making the dog scrunch up his black-and-grey speckled face in pleasure. "I have some water in my car I can give him."

"That'd be great," Steve said. "I'm going to take him back to my place. Vet first, maybe, get him looked over."

"Wait, hold on," Danny said, holding up his hands, "let me get this straight here—you're going to just take this dog? This dog that could belong to anyone. Not, that is not... you're not taking that dog in my car! Why? Have you _smelled_ it? Fine, okay, jeez, it's bad enough when it's one set of puppy dog eyes, two of you should be illegal."

(The vet wanted to keep the dog—who now rejoiced in the name of Beau, in memory of a lost weekend Steve had once spent in New Orleans—in until morning for observation and to give him a saline drip. The vet also mentioned something about spaying, which made Steve flinch in horror, but it seemed as if Danny had been too caught up in complaining about how maybe Beau had had fleas to pick up on that part.)

Herrick had been taken straight to a correctional facility by HPD, which meant that when they got back to headquarters, there was little for Steve's team to do except get started on the paperwork, and to badger the DAs office into giving them some serious alone time with Hesse. They'd hardly been there ten minutes when a courier showed up, had Steve sign a form before he turned over a large cardboard box with a red bow stuck haphazardly on top. Steve opened it warily, half-expecting the thing to explode, but grinned when he saw what it contained—several 12 packs of Longboards, three large bags of cashews, some tortilla chips and some salsa. "Guess the beer's on the governor."

"Awesome," Kono said, snagging the chips, "I knew there was a reason why I voted for her."

"See," Danny said, leaning in around Steve to look into the box, pressed warm along Steve's side, "she's just enabling your non-beer-purchasing at this point."

Steve made a command decision—declared the workday over, cracked open the first round of beers and passed them around. "I think we earned them this weekend, huh?" he said, and grinned when the others all rolled their eyes at him. They ended up sprawled out in the viewing room, calling up YouTube clips on the giant monitor—videos of choice varied between surfing and Athena's previous music videos.

"I'm just saying," Danny said, a couple of hours and several beers later, tilting his head to one side, "I'm not sure how you get to be so bendy. Or what she's doing to that other chick."

"I know," Kono said, all butter-wouldn't-melt. "But you're too young to find out, Danny."

"Look," Danny said, "You can't just _say_ stuff like that, that's—"

"Whoops," Kono said, "gee, is that the time? I'm way late to meet Jenna. You coming, cuz?"

"Hmm? What? Okay," Chin said. When he was halfway to drunk, he got drowsy. "'kay, cuz. Kono. Yup." He listed into Kono once or twice as they headed down the hallway.

"Night, bosses!" Kono called over her shoulder. "See you in a couple of days, maybe."

The last Steve heard before the doors closed behind them was Chin mumbling, "D'you think Malia really thinks I'm pretty, cuz?"

Steve and Danny sat in companionable silence for a while longer, watched a clip of a surfer getting tubed on the North Shore. "I should point out," Danny said eventually, "I've absolutely no idea what I'm looking at here."

He took a meditative pull on his beer, and for a moment Steve just stared at him—the stubble sharp on his jaw line, the dark circles under his eyes. Then he pulled his gaze away, scrubbed a face and said, "Yeah, yeah, maybe we should—"

"Or we could—"

"No." Steve shook his head. "Your place sucks."

Danny looked at him in silence for a moment, then burst out laughing for no reason could fathom. "Okay," he said, "sure, yes, you goof. Come on. Bring some of that beer with you."

Danny'd had a little less to drink than Steve, so he drove them back to Steve's place, fingers drumming rhythmically against the steering wheel while Steve slumped against the passenger window, staring out at the streets they were passing. After a few minutes, for reasons he couldn't identify himself, he started narrating to Danny as they drove: pointing out the alleyway where he'd once chased down a pickpocket; the stretch of beach he and his friends used to hang out on when he was fifteen and the biggest worry he had about the future was whether he'd study chemistry or sports therapy in college; the place where the awesome shave ice stand used to be when he was a kid; the park he went to with his mom all the time the summer she was pregnant with Mary. Danny didn't ask, just let him speak, and by the time they pulled up in front of Steve's house, for the first time in a long time, Steve felt as if some of the most dangerous words had tumbled right out of him, leaving his throat feeling raw and his head strangely light. When the two of them got out of the car, Danny walked just a little too close to Steve as they headed for the front door; stood just a little too close as Steve fumbled with the door key.

"You gonna head to the prison?" Danny said, dropping his car keys on the coffee table.

Steve nodded. "Need permission from the DA in case it messes with prosecution pending, but yeah. Afternoon, maybe."

Danny squinted at him. "You know generally interviewing a suspect doesn't cause issues like that unless you were planning on... you know, don't tell me, I'll have to live through it all tomorrow anyway."

He went to put the beer in the fridge and Steve opened the doors, went to stand out on the lanai. The breeze was coming from offshore, strong and salt-sharp, and Steve inhaled deep, relishing the way the air tasted when it hit the back of his throat. The sun would be coming up soon, and Steve knew that when the adrenaline and the alcohol faded from his system, he was going to crash, but right now he was too jittery to even sit down. He kept his gaze focused on the slowly lightening horizon until Danny joined him. "If you want," he said, "the bed's still made up in the spare room, or—"

"Steven," Danny said, tugging gently on Steve's wrist until Steve looked down at him. "Steve. You think that's really what I want to do right now?"

Steve closed his eyes for a moment, feeling how his eyes were burning with exhaustion, how this was probably the dumbest idea he'd ever had, how he couldn't _not_ do this any more. He broke Danny's grasp on his wrist, reached up so that he had Danny's face cupped in his hands and leaned in to kiss him. At first he was nervous, so nervous, feeling his heart thump oddly in his chest because for the first time in his life he was thinking that maybe _flight_ might be better than _fight_ —but Danny's mouth opened up beneath his, hot and wet, and Danny's arms were wrapping around Steve's waist, holding him so tight and welcome that Steve gasped with it.

"God, you just... you doofus," Danny said when he broke the kiss. "You still... you get this is a sure thing, right? It's not the Williams Way to do things by half, you get that?" This close to him, Steve could see every crinkle around his eyes when he smiled; couldn't resist kissing them.

"Ah," Danny said, eyes going heavy-lidded, "The McGarrett Debating Technique, I see what you're doing here."

"Really?" Steve said, threading his fingers through Danny's hair. The blond strands were surprisingly soft against his fingers. Danny shivered when Steve scratched lightly at his scalp with his blunt fingernails.

"Wiles, my friend," Danny gasped, "You totally have—oh god, okay, if you keep doing that here, we're going to get arrested for public indecency."

"Doing what?" Steve asked, blinking innocently at Danny as if he hadn't pressed their hips close together. "And there's no one around."

"You'll scandalize the jellyfish," Danny said sternly, backing up his words with a sharp nip at Steve's lower lip. "Come on, inside."

"Danny Williams," Steve said solemnly, following him up the stairs. "Guardian of jellyfish morality."

"That's me," Danny agreed cheerfully, and then they were inside the bedroom—tugging off clothes that were sweaty and rumpled, stained with grass and dirt. Steve knew he had to smell terrible, knew that they were both past exhausted, that if he were less selfish he'd be letting Danny sleep, he'd be working on paperwork or on tracing down more connections between Hesse and Wo Fat, but he felt greedy for this. Greedy for the feel of all that smooth, warm skin under his hands, for the sounds Danny made when Steve kissed his throat, for the sensation of tumbling back against the bed with Danny's thigh pressed up against his hardening cock.

"Danny," Steve murmured, "Danny, Danny," breathless with want, and he shook when Danny stretched out on top of him, blanketing him, keeping him anchored, keeping him close. They kissed and touched, moving slowly against one another, and Steve came not long after the sun appeared over the horizon. His orgasm wasn't sudden or loud—it felt like bodysurfing the sudden crest of a wave in the ocean, buoying him up, bearing him closer to the sun so that his whole body felt lit up. Danny spilled against Steve's hip, panting, holding himself up on shaking arms while Steve pressed kisses against his biceps.

"Well," Danny said, rolling off Steve to rest on his side. "If you'd asked me on Thursday how I'd expected my weekend to go..."

Steve cocked an eyebrow at him.

"The particulars might have escaped me," Danny said, smug grin spreading across his face, "but maybe the generalities..." His voice trailed off; he waggled a hand vaguely.

Steve stretched against him, just slow and deliberate enough to make Danny gasp. He relished the scrape of Danny's hairy thighs against his own. "So is this a particular or a general thing?"

Danny made a show of considering, and just that—just knowing that Danny thought he could get away with teasing him about this, that made something thrum strangely behind Steve's rib cage. "Could be a little of column A and a little of column B," he said, tapping Steve on the chest. "You in particular, mapping on to us in general."

"Oh," Steve said, "Huh." Because strangely enough, he was pretty sure he understood what Danny meant by that—was pretty sure he got what the two of them had meant to one another all along.

"Huh, indeed," Danny said, and Steve wasn't sure if Danny realized that he was pressing closer to him. The warmth of Danny's skin made him shiver, made him want to close his eyes and rest right there. Danny's fingers stroking gently over Steve's skin felt like a contradiction; felt right. It'd been a while since he had that. "That has pretty much been my perpetual train of thought ever since you decided to get so obvious. How'd you get so goofy, huh?"

Steve opted for pressing a kiss to Danny's temple instead of answering him. He'd always been better with actions than with words, anyway.

"That is not always going to work, McGarrett," Danny grumbled, but he was resting his head against Steve's shoulder, closing his eyes and running one hand up and down the length of Steve's side over and over, soothing them both to sleep—and hey, this was a win that Steve would take for now.


End file.
